Kant's Argument for Radical Evil

Kant's Argument for Radical Evil Stephen R. Grimm Kant's doctrine of radical evil - which holds that human beings, as a species, possess an innate propensity to evil - has long been viewed as a scandal to his admirers and a stumbling block to scholars trying to piece together his argument in favor of the claim. To his admirers, the scandal stems from Kant's apparent endorsement of the Christian view of original sin, with all of its allegedly misan- thropic consequences. To scholars, the stumbling block comes from the indecisive way in which Kant attempts to establish the doctrine. For example, just at the point in the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone where we would expect Kant to provide a deduction supporting his view, he changes course and claims, 'We can spare ourselves the formal proof that there must be such a corrupt propensity rooted in the human being, in view of the multitude of woeful examples that the experience of human deeds parades before us' (R 6: 33).1 Indeed, the alleged formal proof is not just 'spared' in the sense of postponed; it is 'spared' in the sense of left out of the text entirely. To many, this indecisiveness has suggested a general lack of confidence in the view on Kant's part, and has led to a willingness to regard his treatment of radical evil as an odd, perhaps even neglectable, exception to his overall ethical project. Paul Guyer is typical: 'In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone [Kant] seems to go too far by assuming that evil-doing is not just possible but even necessary.... This doctrine hardly follows from Kant's previous argument, and seems instead to rest on an odd mixture of empirical evidence and the lingering grip of the Christian doctrine of original sin. '2 In this paper, I will argue that despite the indecisiveness of Kant's argument, the doctrine of radical evil is in fact consistent with - and indeed is perhaps a natural extension of his established views on human freedom, the moral law, and moral culpability. To make this case, I will attempt to show that the doctrine of radical evil is grounded in what (following his own usage) I will refer to as Kant's anthropological analysis of the human person (see, e.g., R 6: 26). By an anthropological analysis, I mean Kant's account of the different capacities human beings possess - e.g., their capacity for reason, their capacity to be affected by bodily needs and inclinations, and so on - as well as the ways in which these capacities develop in human beings over the course of their lives (MM 6: 217). It is only in light of these anthropological facts, I will argue, that the doctrine of radical evil can be properly understood. Despite certain well-known passages in the Groundwork in which Kant groups together 'anthropological' and 'empirical' approaches,3 before proceeding it is important to recognize that in the majority of his work Kant carefully distinguishes European Journal of Philosophy 10:2 IS5N 0966-8373 pp, 160-177 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF, uK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Kant's Argument for Radical Evil 161 the two. As he claims in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (a set of lectures which he delivered regularly for nearly thirty years), the two approaches differ in that while an anthropological analysis begins with empirical observations of human beings and their behavior, it goes beyond such observations by orga- nizing them in a systematic manner - in the process raising them to the level of a genuine science (A 7: 121).4 Thus an anthropologist in Kant's sense of the term does not just count or observe the number of times a human being performs some action A, but instead takes the results of such observations and attempts to consolidate them in terms of a more general explanation. Put differently, the anthropologist in a sense takes for granted the fact that human beings perform A, and instead tries to show how the fact that they perform A points to important and abiding truths about their natures. In order to make the case in favor of an anthropological reading, I will first try to clarify what is at stake in Kant's discussion of radical evil. In particular, I will consider the sorts of paradoxes or puzzles which are generated by Kant's claim that human beings possess an innate propensity to evil. Next, I will argue that based on the nature of the puzzles generated by Kant's account, we can rule out the claim that his view is based merely on empirical observation. Finally, and at greatest length, I will consider Allen Wood's important recent treatment of the role of radical evil in Kant's thought.s Although I strongly agree with Wood that Kant's case for radical evil is anthropological at heart, I will argue that Wood misrepresents the true anthropological source of evil in Kant's thought. Wood takes Kant's argument to be essentially a restatement of the Rousseauian doctrine of amour propre, a doctrine which holds that human beings are by nature good and only come to be corrupted by their social interaction with others.6 Against Wood, I will try to show that this Rousseauian explanation cannot be considered Kant's because the origin of radical evil in each human being 'predates,' as it were, our interaction with others. The source of our propensity to evil does not derive from our social relationships but rather from our composite nature as human beings, that is, our nature as beings possessing both animal inclinations as well as the capacity to grasp the moral law through reason. 1. Innate Guilt Kant begins the Religion by observing that, '''The world lieth in evil" is a complaint as old as history' (R 6: 18), and goes on to note, with obvious regret, that the common testimony of the world provides evidence of a natural inclination in human beings towards moral corruption. But how can we make sense of this claim? Though the empirical facts suggest some sort of natural inclination to evil, there is reason to wonder whether a notion such as 'natural evil' is even coherent. According to our common-sense notion of justice, for instance, which Kant endorses, in order for a particular fault or evil act to be imputable to a person it is necessary for the person to have freely chosen that act. In particular, to use Kant's terminology, it is necessary that at © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002 162 Stephen R. Grimm some point the person have freely adopted a fundamental maxim, or rule-like principle, whereby she decided to act for the sake of her happiness rather than for the sake of the moral law (R 6: 36).7 But if this is right, then the very notion that someone could have been born with an evil maxim, in the sense of having biologically inherited it, appears unin- telligible (MM 6: 382). To the extent that someone's will is caused or determined by something external to her, Kant insists, her will is no longer free; and if not free, then not a subject of moral evaluation and a fortiori not evil. Kant thus summarily rejects the traditional account of original sin associated with Augustine: Whatever the nature, however, of the origin of moral evil in the human being, of all the ways of representing its spread and propagation through the members of our species and in all generations, the most inappropri- ate is surely to imagine it as having come to us by way of inheritance from our first parents; for then we could say of moral evil exactly what the poet says of the good: genus et proavos, et quoae non fecimus ipsi, vix ex nostra puto. 8 (R 6: 40) According to Kant, a new theory is therefore needed to reconcile the overwhelm- ing empirical record of human evil with the idea that imputable actions must be free and unconditioned. In order to solve this puzzle, which we might call the puzzle of innate guilt, Kant appeals to his prior work in metaphysics and ethics. As we learn from the first Critique, the natural world - the world in time - is entirely determined by the laws of cause and effect. In the second Critique, however, we also learn that this cannot be the whole story. In addition to our natural or sensuous needs and inclinations, Kant insists that there exists within each of us a pure demand to conform our wills to the moral law and to do our duty even in the face of our sensuous desires. In order for the moral law to be possible, Kant therefore argues that we must possess a capacity for free choice which is undetermined by the causal events in the world. Since everything in the flow of time is determined by causal laws, however, it follows from this that our capacity for freedom must in some way be outside of time (C1 A551/B579). In other words, in order for the moral law to be possible, the events within time, and in particular our sensuous desires, must have no determining influence on our free choices (C2 5: 97). If our free choices are unconditioned by natural causes and hence outside of time in the manner described by Kant, though, then the solution to the puzzle of innate guilt would appear to be within his grasp.

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